English World-Wide - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2010

Native varieties of World Englishes can shed light on competing local and international language ideologies and alignments with different standards, while quantitative variationist methods permit dialect internal analysis of structural variation without direct reference to external standards, by focusing on internal linguistic and social constraints. Contributing to these endeavors, this study examines variation in postvocalic (r)-deletion in Indian English (IndE), uncovering rhotic patterns which are significantly influenced by, and illuminate, distinct urban Indian sociolinguistic alignments. The results also demonstrate that IndE is diverging from both its British colonially influenced past, and from modern internationally prestigious English varieties, through real and apparent time analysis. This analysis focuses on the larger sociolinguistic milieu of IndE emergence and evolution, offering a nuanced response to superficial and oftentimes categorical IndE grammars. Further, studying native speakers offers a counterpoint to L1 contact explanations for IndE stabilization and evolution in the postcolonial context.

This study applies a sociolinguistic and discourse-analytical methodology to the study of features and manifestations of Nigerian English in computer-mediated communication, particularly informal emails. The data comprise 133 email samples consisting of messages received or sent within a seven-year period, i.e. between 2002 and 2009, from typical Nigerian environments, as well as by the youth, adults and the elderly. Analyses reveal that the rise of new media technologies and digital communication has provided a resource for the use and dissemination of Nigerian English alongside Nigerian cultures. The study shows that Nigerian English in informal emails comprises the construction of local thoughts through a range of characteristic properties. In non-standard Nigerian English features like misuse of words, grammatical inconsistencies and a mixture of local pidgin also exist. The study of Nigerian English in informal emails reveals that email samples provide resourceful data for the study of English regional varieties in computer-mediated communication. It also shows that a variety of English is a cultural medium for expressing language habits and socio-cultural practices.

In this paper I analyse variation in the use of past tense be in data from Morley, a suburb of Leeds, in the North of England, using both real-time and apparent-time data. Rather than concentrating on the traditional aspects of this variable, namely alternation between was and were, I identify four phonetic variants of the past tense be system. I propose that the community under consideration are adopting intermediate variants that, both in terms of perception and production, lie between the standard (British) realisations of was [wɒz] and were [wɜː]. A reallocation process has occurred between these two intermediate forms, along the lines of polarity. The inclusion of the intermediate forms of past tense be enables us to perceive previously unobserved patterns of variation with regard to this variable.